Part 17

This was suddenly done for me. One afternoon I was invited to a tea arranged by Henrietta Rodman, Feminist of Feminists, in her Greenwich Village apartment. Wells was particularly sanctified among her group and I must be all right if he approved. As a result of that meeting the suffrage worker, Alice Carpenter, set the wheels in motion for a dinner at the Brevoort Hotel to be held January 23rd, the evening preceding my trial. I was to be given a chance to say my say, speak my piece before a gathering of influential people. Although I did not see her until some years after, I thanked her in my heart many times for what she had done.

In the ballroom were collected several hundred people. Mary Heaton Vorse, Dr. Mary Halton, Jack Reed, Dr. Robinson, Frances Brooks Ackerman, Walter Lippmann, then of the _New Republic_, and Mrs. Thomas Hepburn, the Kathy Houghton of my Corning childhood, all were there.

As we were about to go in to dinner, Rose Pastor Stokes, the Chairman, took me aside and said, “Something very disturbing has happened. We’ve just been talking to Dr. Jacoby. He has a speech ready in which he intends to blast you to the skies for interfering in what should be a strictly medical matter. Remember he’s greatly admired and he’s speaking here tonight for the doctors. We meant to have you come at the end of the program but now we’re going to put you first so that you can spike his guns.”

My trepidation was increased. Nevertheless, I plunged into my carefully prepared maiden speech in behalf of birth control. Fortunately I had already planned to upbraid the doctors who daily saw the conditions which had so moved me and yet made it necessary for a person like myself, not equipped as they were, to stir up public opinion. It was like carrying coals to Newcastle; they should have been teaching me.

I said I recognized that many of those before me of diverse outlooks and temperaments would support birth control propaganda if carried out in what they regarded as a safe and sane manner, although they did not countenance the methods I had been following in my attempt to arouse working women to the fact that having a child was a supreme responsibility. There was nothing new or radical in birth control, which Aristotle and Plato as well as many modern thinkers had demonstrated. But the ideas of wise men and scientists were sterile and did not affect the tremendous facts of life among the disinherited. All the while their discussions had been proceeding, the people themselves had been and still were blindly, desperately, practicing birth control by the most barbaric methods—infanticide, abortion, and other crude ways. I might have taken up a policy of safety, sanity, and conservatism—but would I have secured a hearing? Admittedly physicians and scientists had far more technical knowledge than I, but I had found myself in the position of one who had discovered a house was on fire and it was up to me to shout out the warning. Afterwards others, more experienced in executive organization, could gather together and direct all the sympathy and interest which had been aroused. Only in this way could I be vindicated.

Since my charge had forestalled his, the venerable Dr. Jacoby either had to answer me or shift his ground. He chose the latter course and talked on the question of quality in population, which might perhaps have been construed as in my favor.

Many of the women present were comfortable examples of the manner in which birth control could enable them to lead dignified lives. Elsie Clews Parsons made the suggestion that twenty-five who had practiced it should rise in court with me and plead guilty before the law. But only one volunteered. What surprised me most was the voice of Mary Ware Dennett announcing that she represented the National Birth Control League and that that body was going to stand behind Margaret Sanger in her ordeal—subscriptions were urgently needed for the League.

The next morning when I arrived at nine o’clock at the Federal Court building more than two hundred partisans were already in the corridors. A great corps of reporters and photographers was on hand. The stage had been set for an exciting drama.

Judge Henry D. Clayton and Assistant District Attorneys Knox and Content arrived at ten-thirty, apparently feeling the effects of the publicity of the night before.

The moment Knox moved to adjourn for a week I was on my feet asking immediate trial, but Judge Clayton postponed the case. Everybody went home disappointed.

February 18th the Government finally entered a nolle prosequi. Content explained there had been many assertions that the defendant was the victim of persecution, and that had never been the intent of the Federal authorities. “The case had been laid before the grand jurors as impartially as possible and since they had voted an indictment there was nothing that the District Attorney could do but prosecute. Now, however, as it was realized that the indictment was two years old, and that Mrs. Sanger was not a disorderly person and did not make a practice of publishing such articles, the Government had considered there was reason for considerable doubt.”

Well, when an army marches up the hill and then marches down again some good excuse must always be given.

All my friends regarded the quashing of the Federal indictment a great achievement. There was much rejoicing and congratulation, but they acted as though they were saying, “Now settle down in your domestic corner, take your husband back, care for your children, behave yourself, and no more of this nonsense. Your duty is to do the thing you are able to do which is mind your home and not attempt something others can do better than you.”

But I was not content to have a Liberty Dinner and jubilate. I could not consider anything more than a moral victory had been attained. The law had not been tested. I agreed with the loyal _Globe_, which staunchly maintained, “If the matter Mrs. Sanger sent through the mails was obscene two years ago, it is still obscene.” I knew and felt instinctively the danger of having a privilege under a law rather than a right. I could not yet afford to breathe a sigh of relief.

The Federal law concerned only printed literature. My own pamphlet had given the impression that the printed word was the best way to inform women, but the practical course of contraceptive technique I had taken in the Netherlands had shown me that one woman was so different from another in structure that each needed particular information applied to herself as an individual. Books and leaflets, therefore, should be of secondary importance. The public health way was through personal instruction in clinics.

A light had been kindled; so many invitations to address meetings in various cities and towns were sent me that I was not able to accept them all but agreed to as many as I could. It was no longer to be only a free speech movement, and I wanted also if possible to present this new idea of clinics to the country. If I could start them, other organizations and even hospitals might do the same. I had a vision of a “chain”—thousands of them in every center of America, staffed with specialists putting the subject on a modern scientific basis through research.

Many states in the West had already granted woman suffrage. Having achieved this type of freedom, I was sure they would receive clinics more readily, especially California which had no law against birth control. The same thing would follow in the East. As I told the _Tribune_, “I have the word of four prominent physicians that they will support me in the work.... There will be nurses in attendance at the clinic, and doctors who will instruct women in the things they need to know. All married women or women about to be married will be assisted free and without question.”

A splendid promise—but difficult to fulfill, as events were to prove.

_Chapter Sixteen_

HEAR ME FOR MY CAUSE

“_Speak clearly if you speak at all. Carve every word before you let it fall._” OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Once Amos Pinchot asked me how long it had taken me to prepare that first lecture I delivered on my three months’ trip across the country in 1916.

“About fourteen years,” I answered.

I was thinking of all the time that had passed during which experiences, tragic and stirring, had come to me and were embodied therein.

So much depended on this speech; the women of leisure must be made to listen, the women of wealth to give, the women of influence to protest. Before starting April 1st, I tried to put myself in their places and to see how their interests and imaginations could most effectively be excited, how the pictures which had so unceasingly beset me could best be brought to their minds. I felt certain that if I could do this, they would do the rest.

But the anxiety that went into the composition of the speech was as nothing to the agonies with which I contemplated its utterance. My mother used to say a decent woman only had her name in the papers three times during her life—when she was born, when she married, and when she died. Although by nature I shrank from publicity, the kind of work I had undertaken did not allow me to shirk it—but I was frightened to death. Hoping that practice would give me greater confidence, I used to climb to the roof of the Lexington Avenue hotel where I was staying and recite, my voice going out over the house tops and echoing timidly among the chimney pots.

I repeated the lecture over and over to myself before I tried it on a small audience in New Rochelle. I did not dare cut myself adrift from my notes; I had to read it, and when I had finished, did not feel it had been very successful. By the time I reached Pittsburgh, my first large city, I had memorized every period and comma, but I was still scared that if I lost one word I would not know what the next was. I closed my eyes and spoke in fear and trembling. The laborers and social workers who crowded the big theater responded so enthusiastically that I was at least sure their attention had been held by its content.

It was interesting to watch the pencils come out at the announcement that there were specifically seven circumstances under which birth control should be practiced.

First, when either husband or wife had a transmissible disease, such as epilepsy, insanity, or syphilis.

Second, when the wife suffered from a temporary affection of the lungs, heart, or kidneys, the cure of which might be retarded through pregnancy.

Third, when parents, though normal, had subnormal children.

Fourth, when husband or wife were adolescent. Early marriage, yes, but parenthood should be postponed until after the twenty-third year of the boy and the twenty-second of the girl.

Fifth, when the earning capacity of the father was inadequate; no man had the right to have ten children if he could not provide for more than two. The standards of living desirable had to be considered; it was one thing if the parents were planning college educations for their offspring, and another if they wanted them simply for industrial exploitation.

Sixth, births should be spaced between two and three years, according to the mother’s health.

All the foregoing were self-evident from the physiological and economic points of view. But I wished to introduce a final reason which seemed equally important to me, though it had not been taken into account statistically.

Seventh, every young couple should practice birth control for at least one year after marriage and two as a rule, because this period should be one of physical, mental, financial, and spiritual adjustment in which they could grow together, cement the bonds of attraction, and plan for their children.

Like other professions, motherhood should serve its apprenticeship. It was not good sense to expect fruit from buds—yet if womanhood flowered from girlhood too soon it did not have a chance to be a thing in itself. I offered a hypothetical case. Suppose two young people started out in marriage, ignorant of its implications and possibilities. The bride, utterly unprepared, returned pregnant from the honeymoon—headaches, nausea, backache, general fatigue, and depression. The romantic lover never knew that girl as a woman; she forever after appeared to him only as a mother. Under such circumstances marriage seldom had an opportunity to become as fine an instrument for development as it might have been.

I wanted the world made safe for babies. From a government survey significant conclusions had emerged as to how many babies lived to celebrate their first birthday. These were based largely on three factors: the father’s wage—as it went down, more died, and as it rose, more survived; the spacing of births—when children were born one year apart, more died than if the mother were allowed a two- or three-year interval between pregnancies; the relative position in the family—of the number of second-born, thirty-two out of every hundred died annually, and so on progressively until among those who were born twelfth, the rate was sixty out of a hundred.

I claimed that sympathy and charity extended towards babies were not enough, that milk stations were not enough, that maternity centers were not enough, and that protective legislation in the form of child labor laws was not enough. With all the force I could muster I insisted that the first right of a child was to be wanted, to be desired, to be planned for with an intensity of love that gave it its title to being. It should be wanted by both parents, but especially by the mother who was to carry it, nourish it, and perhaps influence its life by her thoughts, her passions, her rebellions, her yearnings.

So that all babies born could be assured sound bodies and sound minds, I suggested in lighter vein that the Government issue passports for them, calling the attention of the audience to the fact that adults in this country would never think of going abroad without a government guarantee to ensure them safe passage and preservation against harm or ill-treatment. If this were necessary for grown persons journeying into a foreign land, how much more important it was to protect children who were to enter into this strange and insecure new world.

I reminded them also that no one would consider embarking in the medical or legal profession without due preparation. Even cooks or laundresses scarcely applied for positions without experience proving they were qualified to undertake their tasks. But anyone, no matter how ignorant, how diseased mentally or physically, how lacking in all knowledge of children, seemed to consider he or she had the right to become a parent.

In the same tone I proposed a bureau of application for the unborn. I pictured a married couple coming here for a baby as though for a chambermaid, chauffeur, or gardener. The unborn child took a look at his prospective parents and propounded a few questions such as any employee has the right to ask of his employer.

To his father the unborn child said, “Do you happen to have a health certificate?”

And to the mother, “How are your nerves? What do you know about babies? What kind of a table do you set?”

And to both of them, “What are your plans for bringing me up? Am I to spend my childhood days in factories or mills, or am I to have the opportunities offered by an intelligent, healthy, family life? I am unusually gifted,” the baby might add. “Do you know how to develop my talents? What sort of society have you made for the fullest expression of my genius?”

All babies came back to the practical question, “How many children have you already?”

“Eight.”

“How much are you earning?”

“Ten dollars a week.”

“And living in two rooms, you say? No, thank you. Next, please.”

I was trying to make people think in order that they might act. My part was to give them the facts and then, when they asked what they should do about them, suggest concrete programs for leagues and clinics. Many women had far more executive and administrative experience than I, and I still expected them to carry on where I left off so that I might be free to return to Europe.

My hopes seemed well-founded when many of the Pittsburgh audience waited afterward to request help in organizing themselves. Thus the first state birth control league was formed. This and all subsequent ones I referred to Mrs. Dennett’s National Birth Control League to be under its future direction.

That meeting had been held under the sponsorship of Mrs. Enoch Raugh, a philanthropist of great courage. In the early days almost everywhere I went the subject of birth control was one likely to make conspicuous those who identified themselves with it. Average well-to-do persons hesitated except for the Jewish leaders in civic affairs, who, as soon as they were personally convinced, showed no reluctance in aligning themselves publicly.

Not so did Chicago respond. Some members of the powerful Women’s City Club had privately asked me to speak, but when the matter was brought up before their board, the unofficial invitation was officially canceled. Here again were conservatives enjoying the benefits of birth control for themselves but unwilling to endorse it for the less fortunate of their sex. When they did not listen, I tried to reach the women of the stockyards directly.

So many hundreds of letters had come to me—not only in English, but also in Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish, and Yiddish—clamoring for information, that I had every reason to suppose what I had to say was going to be welcome on Halsted Street. I was incredulous when I met an unforeseen resistance.

Hull House and similar settlements had been established to help the poor to help themselves. But I found that although social agencies had originally striven to win confidence by opening milk stations and day nurseries, this aim had been somewhat obscured in the interests of sheer efficiency. Many welfare workers had come to treat individuals merely as cases to be cataloged, arrogantly proclaiming they knew “what was best for the poor”; a type had developed, and those who belonged to it were lacking in human sympathy. Instead they expanded their own egos through domination. Their desire to build up prestige and secure a position of importance in the community had formed a civic barrier, a wall, in fact, around the stockyards district, preventing any new concepts, people, or organizations from coming in without official permission. The stockyards women were literally imprisoned in their homes from advanced ideas unless they went out into other sections of the city.

Because this ridiculous situation had arisen in Chicago, no hall could be had in the immediate neighborhood. I could have held no meeting there had it not been for Fania Mindell, one of the many idealists of that time who threw themselves into the fight for the oppressed as an aftermath of their own sufferings and repressions in Russia. She had a devoted and self-sacrificing nature which made her work, slave, toil for the love of doing it. She made all the arrangements, producing an audience of fifteen hundred from the labor and stockyards environs.

These first lectures in Chicago and elsewhere attracted women in swarms, paying their twenty-five cents to fill the auditoriums; I remember that one offered her wedding ring as the price of admission, to be redeemed on pay day. They brought their children, and more than once I had to lift my voice above the persistent cooing and gurgling of a front-row baby. There was a natural understanding between infants. If one were given a bottle, another began to cry. A third in the back joined the chorus, or a small boy on the side aisle whispered shrilly, “I wantta go home!” I just ached to see those many babies, because I knew what their mothers had come for—definite help to stop having more—and it could not be given them.

Often at these meetings I saw some woman sitting down near the platform holding a bunch of wild flowers, daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, or butter-and-eggs, waiting to present me with the little bouquet, to tell me that since she had received my pamphlet, she had “kept out of trouble.” No matter how phrased, the gratitude was genuine.

Over and over again someone popped up in front of me, and extended a hand, “I used to subscribe to the _Woman Rebel_. I got all your pamphlets from England.”

When I asked, “What’s your name?” with the answer, like a flash, came the number of children and the locality, and the story sent me years earlier. And, “Didn’t you live in Des Moines?” I continued. Seldom was it the wrong place. In this way I came across dozens of “friends” who had been among the original two thousand.

I was advised by Dr. Mabel Ullrich of Minneapolis not to go there because the Twin Cities were the most conservative in America. “You won’t get six people,” she prophesied.

“Do you think I’ll get six?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then I’ll go.”

I was prepared to speak wherever it was possible, regardless of attendance. Six people, properly convinced, usually made sixty people think before very long. In spite of Dr. Ullrich’s warning, hundreds of chairs had to be brought in to the Minneapolis Public Library to take care of the overflow.

People were frequently surprised at the size of my audiences. I should have been surprised had it been the other way about, although I did not like too many present because the subject was too intimate for great numbers in large halls. All came because birth control touched their lives deeply and vitally; they listened so earnestly, so intently that the very atmosphere was hushed and unnaturally quiet.

Here in Minneapolis arrived a telegram from Frederick A. Blossom, Ph.D., manager of the Associated Charities of Cleveland, whom I had met there. Would I speak at the National Social Workers’ Conference then being held in Indianapolis? He could not get me placed on the program, but the two subjects that were currently arousing considerable interest were the prison reforms instituted by Thomas Mott Osborne at Sing Sing, and birth control. He believed it was worth my while to come.

Since I had nearly a week before my scheduled meeting in St. Louis, the time fitted in very nicely and I seized the occasion. I did not expect definite action, but I did yearn to arouse dissatisfaction over smoothing off the top, to say to these social workers plodding along in their organizations that I thought their accomplishments were temporary, and that charity was only a feather duster flicking from the surface particles which merely settled somewhere else. They could never attain their ideal of eliminating the problems of the masses until the breeding of the unending stream of unwanted babies was stopped.

Blossom, polished, educated, and clever, had a charming and disarming personality, and an ability far above the average. Part of his work had been to cultivate the rich, and in this he had been eminently successful because he was so suave, never waving a red flag in front of anybody’s nose as I did; my flaming Feminism speeches had scared some of my supporters out of their wits.

This master manager knew exactly what to do and how to go about it. Notices were posted throughout the hotel and left in every delegate’s mail box, announcing the meeting for four in the afternoon, the only hour when we could have the big amphitheater. Although round-table discussions were going on at the same time, it was jammed to the doors; people were sitting on the platform and on window sills and radiators.